Reading game
Follow the Dots Game
Keep your eyes on the glowing dot as it travels a path that slowly fades away, and catch the words that flash on it. Then prove you were really watching by picking all five from memory.
Free to play, no sign-up. Want to track your progress across six skills? The Axolumi app is coming to Google Play.
How to play Follow the Dots
- Eight dots of different sizes appear on the board, connected by lines that form a path.
- The dots light up one by one along the path — your only job is to keep your eyes on the active dot.
- Now and then a word appears on the glowing dot. Five words show up in total, each exactly twice across the 45 seconds.
- The connecting lines fade as you play, until the path is completely gone and you are tracking from attention alone.
- When time is up, pick the five words you saw from a list of fifteen — the other ten are decoys.
What Follow the Dots trains
- Focus · 45%
- Memory · 35%
- Reading · 20%
Follow the Dots trains visual tracking — the ability to keep your attention locked onto a moving target. Because the words only ever appear on the active dot, there is no way to shortcut the exercise: if your eyes wander, you miss a word, and the recall round will show it. That tight link between watching and remembering is what makes the game more than a passive light show, and it is why the game leans hardest on focus.
The recall round adds a memory layer on top. Holding five words in mind while your attention is busy elsewhere is a classic dual-task challenge: your working memory has to store and refresh the words even as your eyes keep chasing the dot. Add the quick reading required to catch each word before it disappears, and one short round quietly exercises focus, memory, and reading at once.
Tips to improve
- Stay with the dot, not the words. If your eyes are already there when a word appears, reading it takes no extra effort.
- Say each word silently to yourself when it appears — a quick mental echo makes it far easier to recognize later.
- Notice the repeats. Every word appears twice, and catching the second showing is a free memory refresh.
- In the recall round, pick the words you are sure of first. The confident picks narrow down the rest.
Frequently asked questions
A visual tracking exercise trains your eyes and attention to follow a moving target smoothly, without losing it or drifting to distractions. In Follow the Dots the target is a glowing dot moving along a path, and the words that appear on it act as a built-in check that you were really tracking.
The words tie your tracking to a goal. Because they only ever appear on the active dot, the one reliable way to catch all five is to keep your eyes on it the whole time. The recall round at the end then shows you, honestly, how well your attention held up.
The lines are training wheels. Early in the round they show you where the path leads, so tracking is easy. As they fade, your attention has to do the work the lines were doing — by the end you are following the dot with focus alone.
Two things: how random the path is, and how fast everything moves. Easy gives you a gentle path and a calm pace with plenty of time to read each word. Extreme scatters the dots fully at random and moves at the fastest pace, so both your eyes and your memory have to work quickly.
Yes. The game respects your device's reduced-motion setting: the pace slows down, word showings last longer, and the pulsing glow is switched off. The active dot is always marked by size and glow together, never by color alone.
